Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, May 31, 2007 Comments (1)
To really create an effective Internet marketing campaign there are fours areas that need a lot of focus and a lot of carefully-thought-out detail:
* The Color Design and Presentation of A Web Site
* The Navigation of a Web Site
* The Copy/Web Content
* The Optimization Strategy(ies)
Allow me to prioritize these for you:
- Copy/Content
- Navigation
- Optimization
- Design
It might seem kind of strange that an SEO would put optimization next to last on the list of priorities, but there is a reason for that.
What it all boils down to is your content is what sells. It does no good to get 500 million people to visit your site if it doesn’t sell them on your product or service. That’s why you must focus on building great content that sells. I’d rather close sales on 10 percent of 50 visitors than 0 percent of 200,000. Focus on content first.
Once you’re sure you have your content well-written and sales focused, work on your navigation. Again, this is something your site visitors will notice. If they can’t find what they’re looking for quickly and easily then they will leave. The result will be no sales. It’s almost as important as content. Definitely more important than design.
Search engine optimization is the science of optimizing your web copy using keywords and links so that you attract the attention of search engines who index your pages accordingly. It’s important if you want traffic, but as stated before, you can get all the traffic you want and if your content doesn’t sell, who cares?
It is rather odd, I think, that most people focus on design. They’ve got it backward. A pretty website with no sales is just a pretty website, but an ugly website that makes sales gets prettier by the dollar. My compliments to Chris McElroy on that one. The point is this: Design can make your website pretty, and there’s nothing wrong with a pretty website, but content is still what sells; navigation is still what helps your visitors find what they are looking for; and SEO is what helps the search engines index you appropriately. Get your priorities right and you’ll do well online. Get them wrong and you’ll just have another pretty website.
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Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 Leave a comment
(Source) (1) Direct Hit and Teoma were the original social search engines.
- Direct Hit which was purchased back in 1999 by Ask, uses click data to determine relevancy for rank. So the more clicks, the higher the click popularity, the higher a page would rank.
- Teoma uses hubs and authorities to determine relevancy. In a sense, it uses the “wisdom of the crowds” to determine relevancy and show the best results they can.
(2) Apostolos explained in his presentation this morning that they will be combining the best of both Direct Hit and Teoma into one engine.
(3) Apostolos also explained that they have been tagging for three plus years. So for example, if you do a search at Ask.com, that search query you used, will be associated with the pages you click on Ask.com. So if you search on “cars” and click on the first result, the first result will be tagged as “cars” behind the scenes.
I’m not sure I want a search engine that delivers the most popular results. If I want to know specific information about a topic then relevancy is more important than popularity. If Ask.com is going to compete with Google, I don’t know how this technology is going to help them do that. It seems it will do more to make them competitive with Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon.
It’s not that I’m against social search at all. I’m real big on it, actually. But the reason Google has won the search engine war is because it doesn’t try to be a social search engine. It isn’t one. Its link popularity model is a way of ranking web pages for the purpose of helping searchers find relevant information. It sounds to me like Ask.com’s click popularity model is more about pinpointing what is popular among users, which is fine, but if that is the intent then analysts need to stop saying Ask.com is in fourth or fifth place in search engines and start comparing it to Redding and Digg instead.
It is difficult to speculate just what Edison will deliver based on the above comments by Apostolos Gerasoulis. Teoma, if you remember back that far, is the search engine that powered Ask Jeeves; that is, after it was acquired by Ask.com. The reason Ask Jeeves failed as a search personality is because searchers weren’t really interested in the kind of technology that was being offered. Sure, it was cute for a little while, but in the end Google kicked butt with its link crawling technology while Ask Jeeves and his non-specific returns failed to capture enough imaginations to keep it going long term.
Many people still like Teoma. They swear by its Subject-Specific Popularity. I don’t know why. The idea is to rank a web page based on its the number of subject-specific relevance of inbound links. Here’s what Rusty Brick says (in 2004), quoting Teoma executives:
They write, “picture yourself in your garage, in front of the opened hood of your severely out-of-commission pick-up truck. You need help with this major repair, and you can either ask your uncle, who owns two cars but has never held a wrench in his life and happens to be visiting (similar to using other leading search technologies) or you could phone your best friend, who has a degree in applied mechanics and builds automobiles from the ground up in his spare time (similar to Subject-Specific Popularity). The choice is quite clear.”
There’s just one problem with this kind of logic. First, Google does the same thing but it’s only one of hundreds of criteria they use to rank web pages. It’s not the only one, and certainly not the primary one, though it is important. But the problem with the above logic is if I used a search engine based on it then I wouldn’t go to the library to find a book on auto mechanics when I wanted to work on my own car.
Ideally, if I have an automobile problem then I’ll take my vehicle to a trained mechanic to work on it. That’s not an option with search engines. There isn’t a search engine, for instance, that will change my spark plugs for me when I need a tune up. But I can go to any search engine and type in “change spark plug” or “automobile tune up” and, I hope, receive instructions on how to do that. I’d be more likely to get what I want if I type “how to tune up a car,” or “how to change spark plugs.” The point is, the search engine is like a library; their function is to catalog information. If I want to find relevant information on a particular subject then I want to do that with a search engine that is qualified to offer what I want – that is, the one that is best at cataloging information. They must be, first and foremost, information cataloging experts.
Has Teoma proven they are experts in cataloging information? No. That’s why they are not in first place among search engines. Has Google? Yes, for the most part. That’s why they are most popular among search engines. So, when it comes to search technology, I want a search engine that can deliver on relevance more so than on popularity. If I want the most popular results then I’ll go to a social search site like Digg, Technorati, or Reddit. It seems that Ask.com wants to compete in both markets and I don’t see how they will do either all that effectively. But, as they say, the future will tell.
And one more thing, what good is tagging if it is done “behind the scenes?” If you tag it, please tag it so I can see it. That way I learn something and the tag becomes useful to me. I can own it. I can use it. If it is behind the scenes then I must trust you an awful lot to not make a mistake. I’m not sure I can do that. If I could, we’d all be surfing Ask.com, not Google.
Does all this mean I am anti-Ask.com? Nope. I just want them to offer search technology that helps me find what I want. In a word, the verdict on Edison is still out.
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Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 Leave a comment
1) Hyperlinks. This may seem almost silly, but you would be amazed at the number of sites I run into when doing consultations and website analyses that have non-standard hyperlinks. By “non-standard”, I’m referring to javascrípt generated hyperlinks or hyperlinks embedded within flash files.
OMG! You can’t be serious!
Actually, you know, I’ve seen it too. It’s sad. Those links won’t be very valued, even at the great Google.
Flash is making a comeback. It’s cool. And now that we’ve all got maximum bandwidth, unlike the old days when we were on dial up, it’s actually usable. Except that the search engines haven’t learned how to crawl it. Yet.
I predict that some search genius will eventually figure out how to make a spider that will crawl and fall in love with Flash. But it hasn’t happened yet. So just bear in mind that in this year of the third millennium, Flash is unreadable. That includes links. So why have links embedded in Flash files?
Secondly, Javascript is a real lifesaver in some situations. I understand. But too much Javascript in your code is a spider killer. Don’t kill the spiders! They’re the best friends you have.
Feeding a spider loads of Javascript is like inviting it to feast on the fly caught in its web then when it gets there injecting it with poison. You might as well just kill your website and be done with. Here’s a simple solution: Wrap up that Javascript into a neat little little folder and place it in a separate file on your server and reference it from your html. But take out the links. Those links won’t do you any good inside the Javascript.
One simple rule when it comes to links: Use the standard a href tag for all of your links. That’s how spiders get fed. It makes them happy. Then they’ll come back for more flies. Er, links. And other good stuff.
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Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, May 28, 2007 Leave a comment
Google Universal is getting a lot of attention right now. SEOs all over the world are speculating about how the latest change at Google will affect the way is SEO is done.
If you don’t know by now, Google has changed the way it returns results for search queries. Calling the new search model Google Universal, the search engine incorporates all of its technology in the search results. In other words, when you go to Google and type in your search query you are likely to see results from Google News, Google Videos, Google Images, Google Blog search, Google Local, and who knows what else. I see this as a positive for searchers and for SEOs. Here’s why:
Google Universal Will Mean Fewer Outdated Results
We all know that Google has had a problem with returning results that are a bit outdated. That is, you could go to Google.com and search for “search engine optimization” and find at least one or two web pages that on that topic that were created in 2001. Even though SEO has changed since then, you wouldn’t know it if you were knew to SEO and wanted rock solid and relevant information from the latest up-to-date play books. With Google Universal you should see much less of that. However, you will see a lot more of different kinds of search results that you haven’t seen before.
What you’ll get in your top results are more news items, local listings, videos, images, blogs, etc. You may not be looking for a blog but the result will be there. The information itself might not be totally relevant to your search but it will match your search query. In other words, if a blogger addressed search engine optimization techniques that are relevant to European peat moss manufacturers and optimized her blog post heavily for the search term “search engine optimization” then you could conceivably see that result appear in your search results. Unless you are a European peat moss manufacturer, however, you might not be interested in that post.
Google Universal Will Make SEO More Important
What Google Universal will force SEOs to do is optimize every single element on their web pages, in their blogs, and even during their social marketing strategies. You should be doing this already, but if you aren’t then now is the time to start. You’ll have to include more images in your blog posts and use your alt tags. You’ll have to ensure that your viral videos use the properly SEOd alt tags as well. All of the images on your website should already contain alt tags.
Many people don’t know about alt tags. With Google Universal, alt tags will become extremely important. They’re already important, but Google Universal will make them more important. If you own a local website in any industry you’ll have to optimize your website for local search terms as well as for important industry keywords. It should be easier for your local clientele to find you if you have optimized your website correctly. It is conceivable that you could have your images and videos found through local search as well as through universal search.
Bottom line: If you aren’t doing detailed SEO work the way it should be done right now then you likely will fall in search engine rankings, especially at Google. However, if you are doing it correctly then you should rise in the rankings for your important keywords and may actually even do better.
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Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, May 27, 2007 Leave a comment
Even with Microsoft and Yahoo combining their share of the search market, Google has them beat by 20%. According to a recent study by ZDNET, Microsoft is losing ground while Yahoo and Google are gaining ground. AOL and Ask.com are competing for fourth place.
The search engine landscape looks a lot like the technology business landscape in the 1980s and 1990s. IBM started out in the lead, the Microsoft issued a challenge. Dell and Apple went head to head for third place. In the shakeout, each fell into its own market niche and rode the tsunami to the future. Everyone now knows that Bill Gates and Microsoft dominates the technology sector. Is Google the next Microsoft?
Some people are saying so. But why?
To gain some clues as to why Google rose to the top while everyone else just sifted in the sand, we might try looking at their faces. Google’s is pretty simple. Nothing but a search box. It is a search engine after all. If you want something more they have options, but you have to choose them. By contrast, Yahoo and Microsoft offer all of their options right up front. “Hey! We’re more than just a search engine,” they seem to be saying. In fact, Yahoo, the most trafficked website online, gets much of its stickiness from the games that people play and the other services it offers. If people want to search for information, they go to Google.
Recent rumors that Microsoft could purchase Yahoo may be just a rumor or it might mean that both companies have given up trying to beat Google and are just trying to survive. The Internet might be big enough for two, maybe three, search engines, but four? Unless Ask.com folds under – probably not likely due to its recent change in direction and focus – that leaves little room for anyone to grow. Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo have made any real contributions to search technology in recent years. Yahoo’s purchase of Inktomi in 2002 has no doubt secured its place as the second favorite search engine. Google took its place as front runner due to its early emphasis in off page elements, a trait that all of the other search engines have followed.
Where will the search engines be five years from now? It’s anyone’s guess. I do believe a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo might be good for the search industry. The two companies could pool their resources and focus on developments to overtake Google. Ask.com can continue to imitate Google, but it is highly unlikely that it will ever truly compete because Google is now riding on the wave of its success in the PPC market. No one has shown any ability to compete there either.
Google will become more personalized. Others will try. Ask.com will have to specialize or become a niche engine. That will leave the MS-Yahoo team and Google as the two to choose from. Google will still lead though be despised by its users for being huge. They will use it anyway. As for me, I’m looking forward to the future of search. It’s seems so bright I’m wearing shades.
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Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, May 26, 2007 Leave a comment
You can search until your eyes fall out but you are not likely to find a web development company that knows squat about SEO. Many will claim that they can SEO your website. Odds are, though, they can’t.
You have to understand the difference between a search engine friendly design and search engine optimization. They are not the same animal. The fact is, most web designers are not SEO savvy. That’s why you should insist on having your SEO consultant be involved in the web design process.
Too many companies hire a web designer, or web development company, and spend thousands of dollars only to later have to re-do their website because it isn’t getting crawled, or not crawled well, by the search engines. You can save yourself that heartache by insisting that your SEO consultant work with your web design company. If your web design company balks at this suggestion then you should go elsewhere. Otherwise, you’ll end up in the same boat with others before you and have to spend additional money later on redesign.
Here’s the problem: Java and Flash. Two very cool tools, but search engines don’t like them. They make your website snazzy. Yes. But they take tons of code and search engines don’t like sifting through that code to get to the stuff it likes. Therefore, they don’t come back to your website as often and when they are there they don’t find what they need to make themselves happy. You don’t get the ranking you deserve for the keywords you are targeting.
This problem can be fixed by simply putting the code for Javascript and Flash elements into a separate file on your server and referencing them in your HTML. Many web design companies don’t like doing that because it is extra work. But I’d make them do it anyway because it will make your website more crawlable and search engine friendly. If the web design company says they will charge you more for the extra work, ask the SEO if that is a reasonable fee. If he says Yes then pay it; if he says No then find another design company.
Your SEO is a wise man. He likely has been doing business online since before the dot com bubble (If he hasn’t you probably want to find another SEO). Very few web designers or developers were doing business online in 1995. Those that were probably know SEO and if they know SEO then they’re probably doing SEO, not design work. There are exceptions, but this has been my experience.
OK, back to the beaten path: SEO requires hours of research. Web design doesn’t. Your web design company does not have to research keywords, competition, or anything else to make your website look pretty. But pretty won’t make you money. Your SEO will affect your bottom line a lot more than your web design company ever will. That’s why you should focus on a search engine optimized website rather than a pretty face. Most people could get by if they slashed their web design budget by 50% and put the savings into SEO work. Not only will that save you money immediately (since SEO work is often less expensive than design), but it will make you money in the long run.
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Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, May 25, 2007 Leave a comment
When you get serious about SEO you’ll have to decide whether to do it all in house or outsource it to an SEO firm. There are benefits to each, but let me tell you why I think an SEO firm can help you reach your goals faster and more efficiently:
- As specialists in SEO, an SEO firm will stay abreast of the latest industry changes
- An SEO firm may work hundreds of jobs at one time, giving plenty of opportunity to perfect the skills necessary to succeed in SEO
- While the immediate cost of an SEO firm may seem like a step backward, the long-term cost will be less since what you pay for today provides benefits for a long time
- An SEO firm does not have to spend weeks or months learning what they already know about SEO
- A relationship with an SEO firm can be ended much more easily than a relationship with an employee who doesn’t meet your satisfaction
An SEO firm will work hard to ensure your success. We don’t have to juggle our SEO responsibilities with other job tasks as this is what we do daily. In the fast changes that take place in the business landscape you can’t afford to rely on second-rate SEO. An SEO firm will spend all of its time ensuring you get the best results as fast as possible.
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